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[OM] Re: the Black Death was Re: Leopard upgrade

Subject: [OM] Re: the Black Death was Re: Leopard upgrade
From: Garth Wood <garth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:36:25 -0700
Chris Crawford wrote:
> 5 people have died of the Black Death in New Mexico this year already. I'm
> not joking! I didn't know anyone ever got that anymore, but I guess if it
> had to be anywhere it had to be in the USA's little corner of the third
> world, New Mexico.

Actually, according to the book "The Great Mortality: An Intimate 
History of the Black Death" (*great* book, BTW!), the American Southwest 
(New Mexico in particular) has long been known as a modern geocache for 
the disease, with a high and unstable population of rodents.  Another 
one is the steppes of Russia, which is where the Black Death of the 
1330s-1340s was probably contracted by European travelers to/from the 
Orient.  In general, the rule is "stay away from any rodent that appears 
to be staggering."

Yersinia pestis is a relatively modern disease, probably only in 
existence since the beginning of the latest interglacial period, about 
20,000 years ago.  It's pretty much everywhere -- in the late 1990s, one 
of my clients was Alberta Health, which was putting together a 
disease-tracking app.  Yersinia pestis was listed as one of the public 
health concerns of the province.  According to what I've read, Y. pestis 
appears to have been hurriedly cobbled together by evolutionary forces 
as a natural response to rodent overpopulations worldwide.  It crossed 
the species barrier accidentally via the rodents' fleas "jumping ship," 
as it were.

It can virtually always be stopped dead in its tracks by modern 
antibiotics, but only if recognized and treated in time.  We'll probably 
never totally eliminate the plague, but it's no longer the big deal it 
was 700-odd years ago.  Even the manifestation on the Indian 
subcontinent in the late 1800s was nothing compared to the outbreak in 
the mid-1300s.  Epidemiologists and others still have no firm idea why 
that particular outbreak was so incredibly nasty, although they have 
lots of persuasive theories.

During the 1340s plague, in some parts of Britain (particularly portions 
of the Cornwall coast and, oddly, parts of the county of Oxford), the 
mortality rate was 100%.  Entire villages simply disappeared forever. 
Writings which survived depict a population convinced that the Day of 
Judgment had arrived.


Garth
(and yes, I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to the subject of "The 
Plague" -- I read everything I can get my hands on about it...)

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